Highly Allochthonous

The Committee was placed in a difficult position in this case, because as the report itself admits, "neither the allegations of Martz et al. nor those of Parker are explicitly covered under the SVP Ethics Bylaw"; being too judgemental or censorious could well have opened them up to accusations of exceeding their remit, so those expecting some sort of definitive verdict on the allegations are probably going to be disappointed. For the record, their judgement is "not guilty" in the case of Martz:

While it was an oversight of Spielmann et al. not to indicate by citation that J. Martz had previously reached a similar conclusion...the Ethics Education Committee concluded that this omission did not rise to the level of plagiarism, in which there is clear intent to take someone else's work and pass it off as one's own.

and "not proven" in the case of Parker:

Faced with conflicting testimonies, the Ethics Education Committee was not able to resolve these allegations in favor of either side, a position that does not absolve either party of responsibility.

noting later that

Intellectual theft...can be difficult to prove without specific documentation that goes beyond, for example, similarities in anatomical description.

The report's treatment of the specific allegations is in fact rather perfunctory; instead, the Committee has wisely decided to concentrate more on ensuring that situations such as these are less likely to arise in the future. The code of 'best practice' (pdf) that they have come up with includes a lengthy consideration of the interactions between museums and visiting researchers with respect to curated material, emphasising the need for explicit communication regarding intentions and access policies.

Many of these suggestions seem to fall into the category of 'bleedingly obvious', but if this case hasn't made it crystal clear exactly why even the bleedingly obvious should be explicitly stated, I don't know what will. Whatever combination of oversight, miscommunication, ego and less-than-honourable intentions actually led to the Aetogate saga, one has to concede that blithely assuming that everyone is following the same implicit rule book is just asking for trouble - in this case, very public trouble which has been damaging for all concerned, including the wider scientific community. Next time, they'll be no excuses - and I find it quite telling that the Ethics Education Committee and Executive Committee conclude by informing SVP members that they'll be ready next time:

[We] are in the process of evaluating whether to amend and expand the Bylaw on Ethics, so that any future such complaints - if found to have merit - can be acted upon more forcefully.

That represents at least a small victory in the fight against bad actors within the research community - the acknowledgement that they might exist, and there should be procedures in place for identifying and dealing with them. In that context, it's a shame that the Committee had to include a little potshot at the people who made this enough of a controversy to make them sit up and take notice:

the public posting of opinion and correspondence about these allegations on the Internet has not been helpful to resolving these matters, both in regard to the SVP Ethics Education Committee fairly resolving the matters, but also in that it has potentially polarized and biased the vertebrate paleontology community in a way that jeopardizes fair consideration of these matters as a community.

Call me a cynic, but I rather suspect that without the publicity, there probably wouldn't have been any sort of inquiry, and there would have just been a couple more sad and anonymous entries onto the list of junior researchers who feel that they were screwed over by their elders and supposed betters. Furthermore, at least for my part I have studiously avoided passing judgement on the allegations themselves, and focused more on how they were being handled. I've seen far too many complaints get ignored or brushed off with a "that's just the way it is", to trust that they'll be seriously considered without a bit of nudging.

The Albuquerque Journal has posted some sensible comments from Kevin Padian about the report, along with some less sensible comments from the head of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs (who, whilst acknowledging that appointing a board of inquiry stacked with friends and colleagues of Spencer Lucas was probably an unwise move, does not seem to want to recognise that it also led to a laughably biased inquiry which did more harm than good).